Cynthia K. Thompson’s research focuses on normal and disordered language and how language recovers in persons with brain damage. This work makes use of mutually supportive language representation (linguistic) and processing accounts of normal language to predict breakdown and recovery patterns. These patterns provide blueprints for clinical protocols and, in turn, address the utility of this translational approach for studying language disorders. The processing mechanisms that support recovery also are studied by tracking eye movements in sentence processing and production, and the neural correlates of recovery are examined using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).